The American Society for Indexing held its 2026 Virtual Conference, Indexing in Interesting Times: Strategies for Thriving Amid Chaos, on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, and Thursday, June 11, 2026. On Wednesday, Lisa Fedorak presented a session on The Potential of Macros for Indexers.
Macros are a valuable tool for increasing efficiency by improving accuracy, speeding up indexing, and reducing repetitive actions to increase productivity. This session focused on defining macros, identifying tasks that are good candidates for automation, and giving an overview of resources that are available to create one’s own macros.
She gave some examples of macros relevant to indexing work such as copying names from the text and pasting and inverting them in
indexing software. Articles may be inverted in titles of works, and work titles may be moved from subheadings to the main entries. The sorting and formatting of the index can also be adjusted. Macros can be created with specialized software or directly in such programs as MS Word, Cindex, Index Manager.
I will discuss the next session of the ASI 2026 Virtual Conference in the following blog posting. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, please see the Stellar Searches LLC website, https://www.stellarsearches.com.